The Icon and the Axe

When they leave the old man's room and go back into the open air, the boys are suddenly impelled to sound a final joyful chorus. There was a hint of it in the mysterious metamorphosis of Iliusha's dog "Beetle" (Zhuchka), whom Iliusha had tortured and driven away (in a way prescribed by Smerdiakov) into Kolya's dog, "Ringing of Bells" (Perezvori), who turned the last visit of the boys to Iliusha almost into a time of joy. The ringing of church bells provides the transition from Katya's scene with Dmitry to the funeral of Iliusha. But the sound of bells soon gives way to one last "Ode to Joy." It is almost as if the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which Bakunin had exempted from destruction by revolutionaries, were suddenly being acted out; as if each "beautiful daughter of the divine spark" (as Bakunin used to address his anarchistic followers) had suddenly reached the moment in the Schiller-Beethoven text when "all men shall be brothers" and the "aesthetic education of mankind" shall be completed by the realization that "above the vault of stars there must live a loving father."34

In this joyous final moment of The Brothers the image is again that of hands. They are not joined in prayer as Durer would have them or making the sign of the cross in the manner of either the Orthodox or the Old Believers. Least of all is the image one of hands raised to salute Caesar or register votes in some parliamentary body. Rather it is the picture of the hands of children joined near a grave in an unexpected moment of warmth which overcomes all sense of schism and separation, even between this world and the next. A shared newness of life has mysteriously come out of the death of their little comrade. "Let us be going," says Alyosha. "For now we go hand in hand." "Forever so, hand in hand through all of life!" echoes Kolya "rapturously."

The image of reconciliation is profoundly Christian. It is very different from the late Ibsen's pagan picture of hands joylessly joined by shadow people on an icy mountaintop over the dead body of John Gabriel Borkman. Yet Dostoevsky's novel ends not with the traditional heavenly hallelujah but with an earthly cry of joy. As they go off hand in hand to enjoy the funeral banquet and life thereafter, Kolya calls out, and the boys echo, one of the last and best hurrahs in modern literature: "Hurrah for Karamazov!"

???-

3- New Perspectives of the Waning Century

1 he early months of 1881 brought the death of Musorgsky and Dostoev-sky and the end of the populist period in the history of Russian culture. It seems strangely appropriate that Surikov's "Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy," one of the "wanderers'" most famous historical canvases, was first exhibited in St. Petersburg on March I, 1881, the very day of Alexander II's assassination.1 This murder precipitated a program of execution and purge that was as decisive, if not quite as bloody, as that to which Surikov's canvas alluded. The wave of reaction and repression that followed the death of the "tsar-liberator" did not recede significantly until the revolutionary crisis of 1905, nearly a quarter of a century later.

The artists of the populist age had combined remorseless realism with a compulsive conviction that "the people" contained in some way the hidden key to the regeneration of Russian society. Artists and agitators alike-many of whom had been educated in seminaries-frequently subscribed to the vague but passionate belief that some new, primarily ethical form of Christianity was about to be realized on Russian soil. It was not uncommon for "liberty, equality, and fraternity" to be written on crosses; or for radicals to affirm their belief in "Christ, St. Paul, and Chernyshevsky." The ideal of a new Christian form of society drew strength from the indigenous schismatic and sectarian traditions, from the Comtian idea of a religion of humanity, from the quasi-religious socialism of Proudhon, and even from official insistence that Christian Russia had a unique spiritual heritage to defend against the heathen Turks and the corrupt West.

It is hard to recapture the great sense of expectation that pervaded the atmosphere of Alexander's last years. There was a general feeling that dramatic changes were inevitable precisely because of Russia's increasing importance in the world and the need to be worthy of its calling. Dostoev-sky's famous speech in Moscow on June 8, 1880, extolling Pushkin as a